


It's All Fine

by DestielsDestiny



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Brothers, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Coming Out, Drug Addiction, Gen, Holmes Brothers, Homelessness, Homophobia, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Underage Prostitution, M/M, Recovery, Reunions, Self-Acceptance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-23
Updated: 2015-04-23
Packaged: 2018-03-25 09:35:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3805549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DestielsDestiny/pseuds/DestielsDestiny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Existing in a world of goldfish is rather easy. Living in one is something altogether harder to achieve.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's All Fine

**Author's Note:**

> I own nothing.

Sherlock Holmes receives a Betta splendens for his fifth birthday, Grandmere Sinclair of the rather familially unconvential opinion that little boys should have something to care for to teach them character. 

Most children would have preferred a puppy, according to Sherlock’s father at least, but the little boy can’t seem to get enough of the alarmingly electric blue fish. 

It sits in a simple bowl on the hall end table, Sherlock often found sitting cross-legged day and night gazing up at the small swimming creature. 

Perhaps, considering the bowl’s rather precarious proximity to the front hall, it should have been a surprise to precisely no one when it takes less than two weeks for the table to be jostled and the bowl to smash, but the piercing screams that follow surprise everyone but their owner’s older brother. 

But this being the respectable and ancient house of Holmes, the glass is naturally swept away, the fish thrown out, the hall table repositioned, as if nothing had ever been disturbed. 

A week later, Sherlock’s mother has a large tank of gold fish installed in the front parlour. Freshly returned from his first trip to a psychiatrist, a shiny new label firmly diagnosing him as Autistic, little grey eyes watch the pale yellow blobs drift listlessly to and fro, seemingly as bored and lonely as their observer. 

Sherlock is never very interested in fish after that. 

 

 

Mycroft is their parent’s perfect son. The planned one, the one who gets perfect grades and plays sports and rides horses and doesn’t scream at random or dissect things or embarrass them at dinner parties. He’s the normal one. 

He’s the one who stands quietly by while their parent’s tear their hair at the latest Sherlock disaster, the one sends their mother for a calming cup of tea, the one who takes the latest prescription from their father and gently escorts Sherlock from the room. The one who silently throws out the latest round of pills meant to fix Sherlock, tears up the doctor’s notes, sneaks Sherlock up to his room and lets him stare into space for hours, until his heart slows to a normal rhythm and the world isn’t quite so loud anymore. 

The one who always tells Sherlock everything will be fine. 

Mycroft brings home his first boyfriend when he is sixteen. And Sherlock, young and wrong as he is, somehow knows nothing is ever going to be fine ever again. 

 

Sherlock leaves home three months shy of his own sweet sixteen, stuffing a rather battered stuffed blue fish into an equally battered oversized hoodie and slipping out the third floor window with enough grace to come away from the landing with only a few cracked bones. 

He limps his way into London a week later, and takes his chances on the streets. 

He discovers drugs two weeks in. 

Three years later, he’s somehow both still using and still alive. 

 

 

Their parents don’t precisely throw Mycroft out. The Holmes family is far too unblemished by scandal to risk such unseemly rumours springing up. 

Boarding school has a much more socially acceptable ring to it than disownment. 

But for Sherlock, eight years old and watching old Saunders carefully white out Mycroft’s name from the family tree, a spade is a spade.

For the rest of the family though, a spade is actually an axe, and the departure the next morning is equal measures silent and tearless. 

For the first time in his memory, Sherlock can’t even summon the breath to scream. At anything. 

He doesn’t see his big brother again for thirteen years. 

 

 

Coming down off drugs is horribly painful. Sherlock discovers this the first time he runs out of money, three months past sixteen and a six month street dwelling veteran. 

He figures out how to pick-pocket faster than he learns the ins and outs of turning tricks, and that’s how he makes it to seventeen high as a kite and somehow still relatively healthy, in all the ways that would show up on a medical report anyway. 

Extremely relatively granted, but still.

Getting clean then was never going to be something he did on a whim. Contrary to popular belief Sherlock was far from a masochist, and anything that painful would have to come with a damn good incentive to even get him to seriously contemplate doing it voluntarily. 

That incentive walks into his life three days after his 20th birthday. 

Greg Lestrade doesn’t look like much, and Sherlock would never stoop so far as to call him even remotely fascinating, let alone interesting, but somehow he still manages to be a unique experience.

Because Sherlock’s never met anyone quite like him, and probably never will again. 

Because he looked at Sherlock, the strung out addict, the hopeless statistic, the freshly non-teenaged street rat, the freak, and saw exactly what there was to see. 

Because Sherlock doesn’t open his mouth that first meeting, and he’s twenty-one and three attempts at getting truly clean on a rickety old couch with a by-now familiar hand gentling him across his neck later before he pauses to think how far in over his head he is. 

Ten years later, seven of them sober, he still doesn’t know what Lestrade saw that day when he looked at him, why he slipped out a handcuff key and left Sherlock with a blanket. 

But for all that he even forgets the man’s name most days, he will always remember two things. 

Sitting in a dingy back alley three miles from police custody, orange blanket rusting to soiled brown under shaking fingers, a small slip of paper fluttering into his lap, grime already obscuring the scribbled number below the faintly messy “if you need help”, he felt something suspiciously like hope lodge into his chest for the first time since Mycroft was driven out of his life by the remarkably tearful family chauffeur.

And second, head bleary after their latest detox attempt, warehouse walls tilting dangerously to the tempo of a clicking umbrella, a rumpled Detective Inspector doing a damn fine impression of a protective and greying teddy bear, the undeniable truth that somehow, Greg Lestrade gave Sherlock his brother back. 

 

 

Sherlock walks in on Mycroft and Greg three months after their first date. 

It was an accident, a mistake of fumbled timing and poorly executed secret keeping for all of their protection, but Sherlock’s overdose is anything but accidental. 

His relapse would have been less spectacular if he’d been clean for more than three weeks before it, but that doesn’t change anything.

Greg breaks up with Mycroft at the foot of Sherlock’s hospital bed. 

It’s the look of heartbreak on Mycroft’s face that makes Sherlock rasp out “go after him, you idiot.”

It’s the burning aftertaste of the agonizingly shouted “Sherlock comes first, My!” that makes his big brother listen.

 

 

Mycroft and Greg have been officially dating for eleven months when they have their first major fight. Sherlock lays huddled on the couch, wrapped in a suffocating rusty-orange blanket, the puncture marks throbbing a familiar tattoo down his arms, listening to the cadence of falling voice trying valiantly to be incomprehensible in the kitchen. They’re failing miserably at it, but maybe it’s the thought that counts. Their own parents never tried to disguise it when they were arguing about Sherlock. 

They kept arguing about him until Father simply left one day. 

Sherlock waits for the voices to rise into the shouting range before quietly slipping out the door, blanket neatly folded on the couch behind him. 

He checks himself into the rehab facility marked carefully in red ink on all of Greg’s painstakingly concealed brochures later that same morning. 

It is a shaky but painfully clean Sherlock who slinks onto Greg’s newest crime scene six months later. 

Sherlock accepts the hug with rather poor grace, but can’t quite disguise the flash of a smile that greets the flash of gold on Greg’s ring finger. 

 

 

John Watson may be anything but ordinary, but a scintillating conversationalist he is not Sherlock reflects rather uncharitably over their much less awkward than it should be not-quite candle-lit Italian non-supper.

Still, stilted or not, his earnest but surprisingly sincere emphasis on “it’s all fine” stirs something deep inside Sherlock he’d thought died long ago like a fish starving for oxygen and he finds himself replying with more honesty than he should because somehow catching a serial killer just took a back seat to assuring his freshly acquired flatmate that he “knows it’s fine.”

He’s more than a little surprised to pause for breath after the most exhilarating chase of his life and realize that he meant every word.


End file.
